My teenage daughter asked me the other day if it took a long time to accumulate the money to buy a house. I told him, in fact, that you had to borrow in order to buy. She seemed surprised. So, should you go into debt? she told me. Yes, I replied.
His reflection made me think of something. In the economic system that is ours, unless we are really very well off, we have no other choice than to go into debt to access an adequate standard of living, especially in recent decades, with salaries which have increased slower than the cost of living as a result of inflation, particularly in food and housing, to such an extent that some people even have to go into debt by filling out their credit cards for everyday purchases . It should be noted that Canada has the highest ratio of household debt to disposable income in the G7 countries, according to the OECD.
Isn’t this the internal dynamic of consumer society? Are we making it easier to borrow in order to enjoy life now, or even to simply live and pay the price later without worrying about the consequences while multinationals reap colossal profits? The most distressing thing is that we are reproducing exactly the same logic towards the environment, which we are slowly destroying by overexploiting the planet. We are thus indebting the future for our immediate material comfort, and it is future generations, including my daughter and her offspring, who, unfortunately, will pay heavily for the interest later…
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